I used to

push Justin around in this when his toddler legs were still unaccustomed to propelling by themselves. Once when no one was looking I tried to climb in myself. It took me much longer to get myself unstuck.

The real star of the picture

Kids act like they feel. I love them for that.

This is my super

cute grandma:

I get to see her in two weeks!!!!!!

15 months and 1 day

I don't think it's hard to see why you're my favorite.

Courtesy of Jordan Teicher

From Bertrand Russell's autobiography:

"Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy -- ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness -- that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what -- at last -- I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer. This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me."

Chris Spain

"We defend ourselves by not caring passionately; that way, if things don't work out, we aren't really hurt.

But by protecting yourself from the pain of failure, from the insult of finishing second or third or fifth or even last, you preclude the possibility of triumph.

If you give up passion, you are punished twice over. You don't give yourself the chance at those highs, and your life spills like sand through your hands anyway.

I think, maybeperhaps, passionate people have learned there is really nothing to lose.

You are marched to the wall at the end, passionate or not. So why not go ahead and risk everything, because what are you risking? What is the worst thing that can happen?"

You learn something.

Not knowing before you know

"Give yourself the gift of not knowing before you know. Try not to know until the last possible moment -- of story, of day, of life. Or if you have to know, try not to be sure. Be careful about knowing anything without questioning your knowing, because it might stunt you, stultify you, stupid you up."

--Chris Spain

Liu Wen, Gwen Lu

If I had the dough

I would buy you something like this:

even though i know it's supposed to come from your future bai mah wang dze, who's to say a girl can't have two of these in her lifetime? i love how rings are only a little portion of the ridiculous things we talk about.

remember those mix CDs you used to burn for me? they're hands down on the tip top of my Favorite Things in Life. and it's not only because they were just flat out awesome but above all they were an extension of who you were at one point or another: what you liked, what moved you. and i love that even now, i can tell which song's coming after the other before it even begins. there are so many memories associated with each track -- Bohemian Like You, Let Go, Sleep on Needles, Blizzard of '77, The Build Up, What it Feels Like for a Girl, and so many more. I prize every one of them. The mix that started with "Dedicated to the Ones I Love" yields an especially emotion listen every time. My mom loved that CD too; she always made me replay Yesterday Once More so that she could sing along.

you really are.

happy birthday, jess! thanks for being a vital part of my life and sanity and so much of what makes me who i am. i think about it sometimes and i wonder what all would have been lost if it weren't for your presence, both bodily and in heart, and for your wisdom and wit and openness to discuss, to share, to probe and wonder. i love you! our friendship couldn't ever become trivial to me; i'll keep trying to bring you joy and comfort and everything else you need (and do not need). i love you, again, i love you!

here for you, 22 and onward.
-jenny

He said

When Drew saw the picture on the left, he said, "Too much hair. Too little body."
I thought it was a funny way of putting things.

Hear, hear

If you're going to do it

"Chicks who make out with each other for attention should be forced to go down on a thick-ankled, softball playing lesbian."

- Jenny Johnson

Keep calm and carry on

Hydrangeas

Yesterday I spotted a man falling asleep in his wheelchair, head tucked into his wrinkled chest. He reminded me of an old, deflated beach ball resting quietly, undisturbed.

His wife was behind him, helping out a passerby who wanted to know which way was Broadway. The old lady's voice sounded like a tea kettle, and she carried a Strand tote, from which I saw a copy of Better Homes and Gardens. I wondered if she sung to her plants.

"Well of course I sing to them, dear! How else would I expect them to grow properly? The key is to keep the same carol for each. That way it's familiar. They know what to expect."

After the wake

Half a bar of pale pink soap slowly flakes
along me at the bottom of the tub.
I am sprawled in the northernmost corner
thinking of fresh bagels and lox.
I lower my head into the bathwater
until only my nose remains dry.
What might Drew think if he walked in then
to find a lone, fleshy triangle
quietly floating on the water’s surface
as if abandoned accidentally by someone in a hurry?
I laugh, watch as bubbles gush upwards
from my mouth, dissipating in delicate whimpers.
What might it be like to live only for a moment
born from the laughter of a silly woman?

Mark Walberg & Kate

Kate Moss at 18 yrs.

S. Sh.

Letting go means

Go on and fart in class. I don't mind.

(Ir)relevant judgment

Are you giving or taking

Uncanny similarity

This is basically the expression Drew assumes when he's hugging his pillow, which is especially fluffy because it's specifically for those who sleep on their sides. My pillow is for back-sleepers, so it hasn't got as much poof. I sometimes (sometimes) try to do a sneak-exchange of pillows when he's not there. But he always finds out. :(

Stella

I think it's real

From (500) Days of Summer. Not that I super-love this moment but I do like kisses in bed.

From 10 Things I Hate About You, when they went paintballing. This is probably my most favorite on-screen lip lock of all time.

I surprise myself sometimes

Mr. and Mrs. Craker were in New York for the day and they wanted to meet up for dinner with all the Morrison alumni who are here. As always I felt the same old fear/reluctance/anxiety about seeing anyone associated with high school (it's been four years and I still don't properly know why that is). But as I left my internship today thinking "God I can't wait to get home and collapse in bed with my pile of homework/non-homework," that super-dead part of me suddenly was muted. Because I started imagining Mr. Craker saying grace.

"He would say grace at dinner, I know that." And that was that, and there I was on my way to them.

Guess there are all kinds of reasons for saying yes to things.

Be available to obsession

"There must be a thousand thousand ways to rewrite a story; probably as many ways as there are stories. It's so unlike a science; so messy, unpredictable, unclassifiable.
You have to love it for that.

(Didn't mean to suggest all scientists work in black or white. Seems the best scientists, the best anybodies are interested in the grays.)"

* * *

"You can write ten drafts before you find your story. Then you realize you have the wrong character in the right story so you write another five drafts to find the right character.

I always have the wrong character."

-Chris Spain

Suddenly

would really like to eat some seafood right now. asapasapsasappppp.

Lupteae voluptates

dirty voluptuousness

East Coker

To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.

-T.S. Eliot

I'm dating a man

I'm dating a man with very dark nipples and round hairy toes.

p.s. who happens to make exceptional fried rice.

Adaptation

This will never get old for me.

Charlie: There was this time in high school. I was watching you out the library window. You were talking to Sarah Marsh.

Donald: Oh, God. I was so in love with her.

Charlie: I know. And you were flirting with her. And she was being really sweet to you.

Donald: I remember that.

Charlie: Then, when you walked away, she started making fun of you with Kim Canetti...You didn't know at all. You seemed so happy.

Donald: I knew. I heard them.

Charlie: How come you looked so happy?

Donald: I loved Sarah, Charles. It was mine, that love. I owned it. Even Sarah didn't have the right to take it away. I can love whoever I want.

Charlie: But she thought you were pathetic.

Donald: That was her business, not mine. You are what you love, not what loves you. That's what I decided a long time ago.

OMG hi again

Notes to self

Getaway: Dominican Republic!

Sharing some pitchers of our time there! Here are some from Drew and Angela's albums: